Character Animator Tips & Tricks (March 2017)

Over half of this episode is devoted to the community spotlight, including Twitch live streaming examples by Scribbleh & Moose, Digital Puppets showing off their latest innovative ideas with head turn triggered cycle layers and a 3D morphing mask, and a couple of unique recorded pieces. Then we talk about making custom mouth shapes, walking through the recent revised lip sync set that Red Monster went through for the live event. Finally we'll finish up with a few quick usability tips.

0:00 Intro
1:15 Community Spotlight
14:02 Making Custom Mouth Shapes
19:41 Quick Tips
23:56 Outro

Links:

[benh]

Great video Dave - thanks so much for taking a look at the character. It's so much fun to be able to work on this for streaming and find a community of people trying out these ideas! So much to experiment and get creative with. @Scribbleh - you always inspire me man, such a cool character!

[DigitalPuppets]

Hey, thanks for the spotlight, and for the video, we love seeing what everyone else is doing. Character Animator is an amazing program with such huge potentials!

[scribs]

Ey Dave thank you for the awesome spotlight!! Amazing video like always, every month i learn something new like using head turns for animation triggers!?!? Mind blown.. Awesome job @DigitalPuppets GG

[Dbmstuff]

Really great video Dave. Seeing the amazing work people are doing with Character Animator makes me realise I've only scratched the surface of what it can do. Looking forward to delving deeper! Thanks, Rob @ DBM

[gregfish]

Fun to be included among some amazing talents. Blown away by the creativity in this community!

[KeithKritselis]

that mouth tip is great. exactly what I am working on today. 20 mins later and it's a huge improvement!

[al_wombat]

Another great video tutorial, there's always s.th. new to learn, thank you! And great community spotlights! Great to see how this is evolving!

[RichardSticky]

I've really been enjoying the process of building and manipulating puppets in real time. Mouth shapes become a bit more tedious with higher resolution models, but that's expected and makes it all the more rewarding.

[StefanSchuch-video]

An other great tutorial, thanks a lot. My puppets are getting better and better and so many to try - love it!

[MrJohnnygo]

Great video. I did an animation for the Canadian Pacific Railway back in the early 90's using lipreading and LightWave 3D (I was a Video Toaster/Flyer rep in my area). The character's name was 'Spike Steel'. Unfortunately there was no Google around back the so I had to do a lot of research in a real library. I manually went through the audio file and matched the phonetics shapes to the waveform. Turned out great! Now I have this program to work with. Two weeks work back then now takes an afternoon.

[robobin]

I raided scribbleh once by completely accident when he was playing NieR and was madly impressed by his setup. Dude had such a unique set up :D Thanks for the insight, I didn't know he used footpedals, dude's ingenious!

[christopherconkright]

I know this is old but it helps me since i don't like personally being on cam but a character helps me alot

[Delko]

Really cool video, i have no skills like this at all but awesome to see what people are able to do

[tunaaa]

Thank you so much for this video! I use OBS to stream as well and have been trying to put together my own puppet to stream with. I've run into a few problems, like having to always have the Adobe Character Animator window open on another monitor for feedback to OBS to work. This means I can't open any other window on the monitor or the puppet won't respond at all, so I'm really glad something like Syphon will be coming to Windows!

[Mike_in_Thailand]

Thanks for the tip about "reset layers"....I've had the problem of coming back from photoshop to find an arms fallen off !Re the custom mouth shapes ..Have you played with Fuse ? I've been experimenting with making a character with Adobe Fuse and then using Windows snipping tool to copy the screen as a jpg, taking that into PS and modifying the mouth. Fuse lets you change the mouth shape a bit ...smile, open mouth, closed mouth etc, so that gives some mouth options. Then by cutting out the lips, copying on to a new layer,  and using puppet warp I can then drag the lips into other positions. By using semi opaque layers I can keep the teeth in line just as you did with Illustrator.Fuse also lets you have characters with eyes open, closed or inbetween so that helps with the blink cycles too.

[starwarshq]

Great tutorial once again Dave! Quick question: I noticed you said one of the animators used foot pedals to trigger animations...anyway you could explain how to do this a bit more? I would love to be able to use something else besides my standard keyboard. A foot pedal or maybe even that switch board I saw the Simpsons creators were using would be awesome tools in order to trigger animations.

[TheTorrador]

Hey Okay Samurai! I watched all your videos about Character Animator except some of tips & tricks videos and I liked so much them!
I would know if you already recorded a tips & tricks video about shadows or if you can tell me in chat how can I do shadows that moves near to the puppet.

[fortarrigo]

Hi Dave. Thanks for your video! What about Character Animator updates and roadmap for next months? I love this software!

[pifmeister]

Awesome job as always! I wish I was able to do this kinda stuff too!

[earthcolours_]

Nice video, it's AWESOME the things you can actually do with this.
One Question how would you make a shadow on a character that's created by say, hair covering the face but since hair moves how would you get the shadow to move with the hair??